


Paperwork

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 1930s Slurs (Briefly Mentioned), Light Angst, M/M, Marriage of Convenience, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-26 19:21:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7586740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The Russians want Barnes," Phil said. "And they're not the only ones." Steve snorted, unsurprised. The Russians, the Malaysians, the whole damn world - they could all <em>get in line.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Paperwork

**Author's Note:**

> As always, reposted from tumblr, beta'ed by the extraordinary cabloom, and set in some alternate universe that veers off from MCU canon after TWS, because that's the last CA movie I've seen.
> 
> I believe the original prompt had something to do with arranging a fake marriage, and somehow that turned into a very long wikipedia search for international extradition agreements, and a one-shot that unfortunately resembles a prologue.

“What do you mean, extradite?” Steve asked, frowning at Coulson. “He’s a U.S. citizen.” He glanced to his left, where Bucky sat in one of the cramped chairs in Phil’s new office, freshly cut hair brushing the tops of his ears, metal and flesh fingers intertwined between his knees. Bucky hadn’t looked up from his hands since they’d come into the office. “And he hasn’t done anything wrong,” Steve added, ignoring the tightening around Coulson’s eyes and the disbelieving snort from his left.

“My hand on the trigger,” Bucky said, soft and dry where Steve remembered him brash, hooting with laughter, larger than life. Brighter than anything else in Steve’s world. “My eye behind the scope.”

Coulson coughed, swallowing a few times and tapping his foot the way he always did when he had to tell Steve something that he didn’t want to hear. Days like this, Steve missed Nick, who would’ve come right out with it and let Steve bleed.

“Be that as it may,” Phil responded to Steve, choosing to leave Bucky’s comments hanging like corpses in the stale office air. “We don’t have any  _ proof  _ that he -” One hand waved at the dark-haired man hunched in his chair. “- really is James Buchanan Barnes, and the Russians have quite a lot of photographic proof that he’s a killer.”

“What do you – Of  _ course  _ he’s Bucky! Why would anyone even -”

“Not everyone is going to take Captain America’s word for it,” Phil cut in gently, too kind or too starstruck to mention the multitude of newspaper articles that Nat had tried to hide from Steve, articles questioning Captain America’s sanity and baying for the Winter Soldier’s blood. Steve could count the people who believed Bucky was real on one hand – and all too often, that count didn’t include the man asking Steve for his own name. “And honestly, they have convincing evidence, and anything connected to SHIELD is automatically suspect. The Pentagon would probably turn Barnes in just to save some face after your stint over the Potomac.”

“The US doesn’t have an extradition agreement with Russia,” the soft voice said, and Bucky barely flinched when Steve curled a hand around the back of his neck. It was a habit Steve had picked up in ‘43, when he was finally tall enough to reach and there had been days when he felt like Bucky would disappear into the shadows haunting his eyes unless Steve wrapped a hand around him and hung on.

He would have fought Death for Bucky. But Death was too smart, had learned his lesson eons ago with a different hero, and he’d tricked Steve instead.

Steve had lost Bucky once. He wasn’t about to do it ever again.

“That’s true,” Phil agreed, “but the government’s so eager to distance themselves from SHIELD that they’d probably hand  _ Nick  _ to the Russians, if they could find him.”

“Then we disappear,” Steve declared, rubbing his thumb over the soft, short hair on Bucky’s neck. “Nobody’s going to look for us in Kansas.”

Bucky’s head lifted, just a little, and he lifted the right side of his mouth in a faint smirk. “Looking for Dorothy, pal?” he murmured, and Steve laughed, the sound enough to startle Phil. No one had heard Captain America laugh, not since he came out of the ice.

“I’m not sure setting off an international manhunt is the answer,” Coulson interjected, his cheek twitching. “Also, Barnes is right - the US won’t give Russia anything unless they get Snowden in return. But we  _ do  _ have an extradition treaty with Germany, and some of the evidence puts him there. We could try to reach an agreement where the maximum penalty is life in prison, which is at least better than …”

He trailed off, pinching his lips together as the body under Steve’s hand went entirely still, rigid with something that Steve did not want to call fear. Imprisoned in a cryo chamber. Imprisoned on a table in Italy, in a cell with other dying men. Imprisoned by the walls they’d put up in his mind, trapping him in the present, leaving him without a past, unable to create a future.

“No,” Steve said harshly. “Bucky’s not going to prison. They want someone to blame, why don’t they take the scientists who experimented on him, or the agents who beat him when he didn’t conform?”

“Steve. Stevie.” The hand on Steve’s elbow drew him back, Bucky’s face tilted up to catch Steve’s gaze. He hadn’t even noticed that he’d leaped to his feet, set himself between Bucky and Phil. “Ain’t everyone who sees it like you do,” Bucky said, but he let Steve hang onto his hand after he sat back down. The more he remembered, the more Bucky sounded like the home Steve had lost. “They’ve got a right to justice, Stevie.”

“Nothing that happened to you was just,” Steve spat, clenching his fingers around Bucky’s hand. Phil swallowed loudly, and tried to shrink behind his desk. Apparently he wasn’t used to superheroes arguing in his office. “And no one is taking you away.” _From me_. Not again.

“So, Germany?” he asked Phil, drawing the older man back into the conversation. “And they can have him because we can’t prove that he’s a US citizen?”

“That’s pretty much it,” Coulson admitted hesitantly. “It would be different if we had DNA samples, or some clear evidence, but DNA hadn’t even been discovered in the 1940s. I don’t know what else -”

“If he was a US citizen,” Steve interrupted, because he had no patience for another interminable history lesson. Not today. “Then he couldn’t be extradited?”

“Well, it would at least be more difficult.” Phil frowned. “And they wouldn’t want to set a precedent for shipping citizens off to foreign courts, so it might enough to keep him here. But, Captain Rogers, there’s no way for us to prove that this is Sergeant Barnes, here and now.”

“We don’t need to prove that,” Steve told him, feeling the cool skin of Bucky’s hand, the pulse at his wrist.

“Oh no,” Bucky muttered, familiar and low. He shook his head, watching Steve with a look that said he knew his best friend was about to do something downright dumb, and that he would be following him into the chaos that clung to Steve like a second skin.

“We can get married, instead.” Phil choked. Bucky’s eyebrows shot up. When no one said anything, Steve paused. “That is legal now, isn’t it? I can marry Bucky – everyone agrees that _I’m_ a US citizen, and then he’ll be one, too. Again.”

“We can get married?” Bucky asked, the shadows fleeing momentarily from his face. “You and me? Men can marry men?”

“Yeah,” Steve breathed, trying not to remember the day he had learned that. Asked a foolish question by a reporter with no tact, hoping for Captain America’s righteous, narrow-minded indignation – and Steve’s throat had closed with the grief of it, for all the things he never could have had. For the only thing he’d ever wanted. “It doesn’t have to mean anything, Buck. But they’re not going to say Captain America might be foreign, are they? So they’ll have to make you a citizen, too.”

“'Course it means something,” Bucky replied, and Steve felt his stomach roll, waiting for Bucky to pull his hand away. “Means you finally have to shine my shoes,” his friend added, a faint smile on his face.

Steve choked on the breath he’d been holding, wondered if he might tumble off the chair. Bucky had never said anything against queers when they were kids, no more than he had said anything about the Krauts or Dagos, but Steve couldn’t help expecting the disgust they’d been raised with, that two men might want to _marry_. Couldn’t help the intoxicating rush of relief when that condemnation didn’t come.

“Oh, yeah?” Steve retorted. “You gonna cook me dinner, then? Mend my suits?”

“Your suits would be fine if you quit running into bad guys with your face,” Bucky sniped, the words out of his mouth before he’d processed them. As soon as he did, his face fell, and he tugged his hand away from Steve. The last person who had run into Steve’s face had been the Winter Soldier, with steel fists and a rabid desperation to forget.

Steve flipped his hand over so that he could hold onto to Bucky’s knee, squeezing forgiveness into jeans and muscle. “I’ll shine your shoes,” he acquiesced, hoping to draw Bucky back, knowing from months of experience that he would fail. “I might even wear lipstick, if you’re lucky.”

Bucky folded over, as close to the fetal position as he could manage in public, but he let Steve’s hand stay. No matter how bad it got, Bucky always let Steve stay, and Steve wasn’t such a fool that he would ask for more.

“Are you serious about this?” Coulson demanded, his voice fainter than usual. Apparently superheroes didn’t propose in his office. Though if Steve were truly going to propose, he would have wanted to be in their new apartment, kneeling on the hardwood floor as the sun set over DC, a ring box in his hand and Vera on the phonograph. He would have wanted Bucky’s pale eyes to reflect the vivid pinks and golds striped across the sky, the way his smile would reflect the love shining in Steve’s nervous smile and faltering words.

Instead, they sat in Coulson’s windowless office, the whole building still smelling of paint and new carpet; and Bucky’s pale eyes were focused on his folded hands, and on a past neither of them could change. Steve suspected that he still radiated devotion - even without the sunset or the smile - but he had done that for years, and no one had suspected that it was the sort of devotion that sent a man onto one knee.

“We’re serious,” he said, because Bucky wouldn’t speak again for hours. Steve would make stew for dinner, thick and Irish, the smell of it dragging Bucky from a haze of pain and blood, dragging Steve back to his mother’s kitchen in 1935. “Will it work?”

“It just might,” Phil hedged, already typing out a list of people to contact about Steve’s impending marriage. “At the very least, no one wants to execute Captain America’s husband, so it should buy us some time. It’s going to be a media frenzy, though. And I can guarantee you’re going to be investigated by INS, because this marriage will scream 'fraud’ to them.”

“It’s not a fraud,” Steve insisted, sounding too fierce. He didn’t look to his left; Bucky wouldn’t make eye contact, not now, and Steve was grateful. He was a terrible liar, and Bucky would see right through him, same as always. “It’s a way to give Bucky his life back. The media can say whatever they want about me. It might take some of the heat off Tony, after the last global Stark disaster.”

Phil chuckled, waving them away a few minutes later when it became clear that Steve had nothing to contribute besides a marriage proposal. They shook hands, and Steve tugged Bucky to his feet, leading his fiancé out of the squat, repurposed factory building. Maybe a ring could keep Bucky in the country - keep him free - but it was still Steve’s hand on his neck that kept him from fading away, kept him close as Steve took them both home.

**Author's Note:**

> There are two (intentional) references to 1930s/WWII U.S. (NYC) gay culture, in case you're one of those people who wants a dose of dry history with your fic:
> 
> Back in the Big Apple, in the days of private eyes and - Kidding. Back then, "normal" which was a designation for "straight," the same way "queer" and "fairy" designated certain sexual preferences combined, to an extent, with lifestyle choices. "Normals" (and their wholesome, "I do" lifestyle) were often derided within the LGBTQ+ (to be anachronistic) community, and somewhere there's a good post on why, if Steve had been gay in the 1930s, there's a fair chance he wouldn't be fervently supporting gay _marriage_ specifically, because who wants to be more like the "normals"? Which is a long-winded way of saying that Steve's concern about Bucky's reaction to gay marriage can be understood in more than one way.
> 
> The second is connected to Bucky's easily overlooked _Wizard of Oz_ reference. If you missed it (like Steve did), google "friend of Dorothy," and then wonder _what_ exactly Bucky was intimating to Steve.


End file.
